------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Christmas Review of BBC DU stories, 2001
Indian Missiles Put 'in Position'
Pakistan military warns of nuclear conflict with India
India, Pakistan deploy missiles
Russian journalist sentenced to 4 years
GAO Study Criticizes Finances for Nuclear Plants
Report Faults Fiscal Review of Nuclear Plants
Cleanup finished at Flats building
Rumors of lab closures do not include ORNL

MILITARY
Afghanistan's New Ministers Go to Work and Face Plenty of Old Problems
Key al-Qa'eda contact said captured
U.S. sees bin Laden leaving by sea
Uzbek warlord named deputy defense minister
Big Troop Movement Mounted by India and by Pakistan
Tensions Escalate Between India and Pakistan in Kashmir
Turkish General: Don't Target Iraq
Tokyo defends firefight with suspected spy ship
Pak cancels leave for all military personnel
Groups Slam Russian Treason Verdict
Campaign by Pilot's Family Secures Benefits for Gulf War Veterans
Gulf lessons used to avert Afghan 'syndrome'

POLICE / PRISONERS
Ridge Is Opening a Center to Analyze Data
'Disaster' averted on blast devices

ACTIVISTS
No War in God's Name, Pope Christmas Message Says
Franco Dino Rasetti, a Nuclear Pioneer, Is Dead at 100
On charity and love, from the epistles of Paul the Apostle



-------- NUCLEAR


-------- depleted uranium

Christmas Review of BBC DU stories, 2001

NucNews Editor,
12/25/01

BBC should have won an award for its coverage of depleted uranium up until the Afghan war -- the only news agency to consistently dig into the issue. However, the question now arises: where are the stories about D.U. in Afghanistan? As a year-end review, many of this year's BBC stories are printed below, in chronological order. Note the gap since August 23rd. You can write BBC to ask why the silence

---

Q&A: Depleted uranium weapons
By environment correspondent Alex Kirby,
January 4, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1101000/1101447.stm

Portuguese doubts on depleted Uranium
Saturday, 6 January, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1104000/1104024.stm

Depleted uranium: EU concern grows
Nato is still deployed potentially contaminated areas
Saturday, 6 January, 2001, 14:03 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1102000/1102147.stm

Uranium row tests Nato
By Defence Correspondent Jonathan Marcus
Monday, 8 January, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1106000/1106290.stm

Israel denies depleted uranium use
Monday, 8 January, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/newsid_1106000/1106531.stm

The military uses of DU
Tuesday, 9 January, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1108000/1108058.stm

NI Balkans vets offered health tests
Tuesday, 9 January, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/northern_ireland/newsid_1108000/1108591.stm

Bosnia to set up uranium commission
American jets fired these DU anti-tank rounds
By the BBC's Alix Kroeger in Sarajevo
Wednesday, 10 January, 2001, 16:37 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1110000/1110242.stm

UN presses for more uranium research
Radiation checks are under way in Bosnia and Kosovo
Thursday, 11 January, 2001, 21:29 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1111000/1111411.stm

UK considers DU testing
DU tipped weapons were used to destroy tanks in Kosovo
Friday, 12 January, 2001, 07:52 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_1112000/1112942.stm

DU dangers 'known' before Gulf War
Radiation checks are under way in Bosnia and Kosovo
Monday, 15 January, 2001, 21:57 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1118000/1118590.stm

Serb doctor's uranium warning
Monday, 15 January, 2001, 17:26 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_1118000/1118876.stm

Spain spurns depleted uranium concerns
Tuesday, 16 January, 2001, 13:48 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1119000/1119018.stm

Depleted uranium: The next generation
Thursday, 18 January, 2001, 00:14 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1122000/1122566.stm

Depleted uranium: Bosnia tests start
There are concerns about the possible effects of DU in Bosnia By Alix Kroeger in Sarajevo
Thursday, 25 January, 2001, 08:04 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1135000/1135846.stm

Call to stop uranium shell tests
Wednesday, 7 February, 2001, 09:35 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/scotland/newsid_1157000/1157417.stm

Dundrennan: Under friendly fire
Tuesday, 20 February, 2001, 13:23 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/scotland/newsid_1180000/1180083.stm

Fresh fears over depleted uranium
Thursday, 12 April, 2001, 08:29 GMT 09:29 UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/scotland/newsid_1273000/1273053.stm

WHO studies depleted uranium in Iraq
Thursday, 23 August, 2001, 16:56 GMT 17:56 UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1506000/1506151.stm

-------- india / pakistan

Indian Missiles Put 'in Position'
Tensions Rise on Pakistani Border

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 27, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28298-2001Dec26.html

NEW DELHI, Dec. 26 -- India deployed ballistic missile batteries and increased jet fighter patrols along its border with Pakistan today, Indian officials said, as tensions intensified between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

The buildup of troops and weapons on both sides of the border is part of a tit-for-tat escalation in the wake of a terrorist attack on India's Parliament earlier this month that authorities here blame on Muslim militant groups based in Pakistan.

India's defense minister, George Fernandes, confirmed today that the country's missile systems, which include Russian medium-range missiles as well as truck-launched rockets made in India, are "in position." Fernandes did not elaborate, but other Indian defense officials said the missile batteries were deployed close to the border in response to similar moves by Pakistan over the past few days.

Both nations carried out a series of nuclear tests in 1998, but precise details of the new deployments are not known, nor is it clear that missiles dispatched to the border are nuclear-armed.

"It is a very dangerous gray area," said Uday Bhaskar, the deputy director of the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis, a research organization in New Delhi. "The nuclear question mark has drastically raised the stakes of this confrontation."

Indian officials said they were strongly considering military strikes against Pakistan if it did not stamp out the militant groups, which are fighting to end Indian rule in Kashmir, a Himalayan region that borders both countries and is claimed by each. Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has condemned the Parliament attack but said he would not move against the militants, whom he calls "freedom fighters," without evidence of their involvement, which India has thus far refused to share with Pakistan.

U.S. officials have voiced concern that the escalating tensions could hinder efforts to capture members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network attempting to flee Afghanistan for Pakistan. An outbreak of fighting between Pakistan and India could result in a redeployment of the more than 60,000 Pakistani soldiers stationed along the Afghan border and could affect the U.S. military's ability to use Pakistani military bases, which have been important staging grounds for operations in Afghanistan.

"An all-out war between India and Pakistan would not just disrupt the hunt for bin Laden, but it would make the whole American military campaign seem like a schoolyard fight," a Western diplomat here said.

Cognizant of the risks of a full-scale war, some Indian officials have said that the military buildup is less a prelude to armed conflict and more an effort to force Musharraf to crack down on the militant groups. Indian analysts also said the mobilization is designed to alarm the Bush administration, with the hope that Washington will lean on Musharraf, who has become a principal ally of the United States in its campaign against terrorism.

In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell formally designated two militant Pakistani groups as terrorist organizations today as the United States continued to pressure Musharraf to dismantle the groups. Powell spoke twice with Musharraf and twice with Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh and urged the two sides to stand down from the military buildup.

On Friday, Musharraf's government announced that it was freezing the assets of one of the groups implicated by India in the attack on Parliament, which took place on Dec. 13 in New Delhi. And on Tuesday, Pakistani authorities detained Masood Azhar, the founder and leader of the Jaish-i-Muhammad organization, the group on which India has placed the bulk of the blame for the assault.

Azhar was held in a police station for several hours Tuesday night but later was placed under house arrest, officials said. Today, Pakistani officials said police arrested 30 Jaish members at the group's offices.

Indian officials, who have demanded that Azhar be turned over to them, called Pakistan's moves insufficient. "Still much more needs to be done," said a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Nirupama Rao. "It doesn't seem to go far enough to address our concerns."

India contends that the militant groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir have been supported by Pakistan's military and intelligence service. Musharraf has denied that his government helps the militants, or has any control over them. He and other Pakistani officials maintain that the armed insurgency is a product of years of human rights abuses in Kashmir by the Indian military.

The dispute has placed the United States in an awkward position. The Bush administration is afraid of pushing Musharraf too hard out of fear that drastic actions against the militant groups, which enjoy broad popular support in Pakistan, could weaken his grip on power. At the same time, U.S. officials are reluctant to chastise India too severely for contemplating military strikes because doing so, one Western diplomat said, "would sound hypocritical after September 11."

"What India wants to do is the same thing that the United States has done in Afghanistan," the diplomat said. "They want to go after a country they believe sponsors terrorists. And they want the United States to make Musharraf do to the militants exactly what he did to the Taliban -- cut off their support."

But many politicians and scholars here doubt that Musharraf will crack down on the militant groups to an extent satisfactory to India. As a consequence, some officials and analysts said, the two countries are heading toward a military confrontation.

"If nonmilitary measures do not yield any tangible results, the thinking is clear that [India] will have no other option but to apply military force," said Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

"If people in the West think this is all just for show, they're making a grave mistake. They should not assume that the Indian state does not have the stomach to confront Pakistan and to impose costs on them."

Although the militants have carried out numerous strikes in Indian Kashmir, the attack on Parliament, which left 14 people dead, including the five attackers, has raised the ire of politicians here to unprecedented levels. "It was an attack on the heart of our democracy," Chellaney said.

Indian military officials said the mobilization of troops and equipment, the largest in more than a decade, is not part of a campaign to sway either Musharraf or Washington. "Deployments are not for posturing," an official said. "They are an operation for war."

In the western state of Rajasthan, local officials said blackout exercises were being conducted in border districts at night to prepare civilians for a possible military confrontation. The officials reported that thousands of panicked residents were fleeing border areas, while convoys of military vehicles were moving in.

Indian and Pakistani troops have massed not just in the Kashmir region, a traditional flash point between the two nations, but all along their shared 1,800-mile border.

An Indian Defense Ministry spokesman called the deployment a "precautionary measure." In Pakistan, a government spokesman said the nation would "act with restraint."

But Pakistan's foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, accused India of having "something sinister in mind."

"Our forces are absolutely well-prepared to counter any aggressive move," Sattar said on state-run television.

But some officials and military analysts question India's strategy if it were to actually go to war. Simply targeting the militants' training camps in Pakistani Kashmir would have little impact because the facilities, which often consist of little more than tents, can be rebuilt easily, the analysts said.

Indian intelligence officials said they also believe that many of the camps have been moved away from the border since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. And, they note, the headquarters of the two largest militant groups are in major Pakistani cities.

The other option, going after the Pakistani military, could be more dangerous. "It could embroil us in a much bigger war than we want," said Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyan, a former adviser to India's national security council.

"The fact is they don't have any military options that are attractive," a Western diplomat said. "It's either full-scale war or symbolic pin pricks."

Before resorting to force, Indian officials said they would attempt to exhaust what one called "diplomatic offensives." On Friday, India recalled its top envoy to Pakistan for the first time in 30 years and suspended bus and train service between the countries.

India's security cabinet met today to discuss additional diplomatic and economic measures, but held off making a decision until Thursday, when Fernandes is scheduled to return from visiting troops on the border.

Indian officials said they are considering suspending trade agreements and air travel between the countries. They also said the government likely will force Pakistan to reduce the size of its diplomatic mission in New Delhi, a move that Pakistan will almost certainly emulate.

India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars -- as well as a major border skirmish in 1999 -- over Kashmir.

Islamic militants, who are fighting for independence or merger with Pakistan, have carried out strikes in Indian Kashmir since 1989. Human rights groups say the insurgency has killed more than 60,000 people.

Special correspondent Rama Lakshmi contributed to this report.

--------

Pakistan military warns of nuclear conflict with India

By Raja Asghar
Tuesday December 25, 3:50 AM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-80387.html

CHAKOTHI, Pakistan (Reuters) - A senior Pakistani army officer said on Monday continued border clashes with India could spark an uncontrollable flareup involving nuclear weapons.

The two neighbours have reinforced positions on either side of their disputed border in Kashmir since a December 13 suicide attack on the Indian parliament which killed 14 people. New Delhi blamed two militant groups based in Muslim Pakistan.

Local sources said on Monday that Pakistan's army had deployed anti-aircraft guns and moved most troops from the eastern garrison town of Sialkot to the border with India.

Pakistani and Indian troops only watched each other with distrust from bunkers on either side of a broken bridge at Chakothi in the west of disputed Kashmir when a group of journalists visited the Pakistani side of the front line.

But both sides reported exchanges of fresh mortar and heavy machinegun fire elsewhere in Kashmir and New Delhi expelled a Pakistani diplomat, raising tensions between the nuclear-armed adversaries ever higher.

Pakistani Brigadier Mohammad Yaqub said the situation was "highly explosive".

"Because in that situation, that tension, even a small little incident can result in a chain reaction which nobody will be able to control," he told Reuters Television at Muzaffarabad, capital of the Pakistani-held part of Kashmir.

He said an all-out war between the two nations could "become really horrific for the entire world".

Asked if nuclear weapons could be used, Yaqub, giving what he called his personal view, said:

"But if there is a war between the two countries and if any country feels that it comes to its own survival, probably there won't be any hesitation to use nuclear weapons."

A brief statement from the military's public relations department said the top-brass of Pakistan's armed forces met in the garrison town of Rawalpindi and "discussed matters relating to defence, national security and professional aspects".

A source in Sialkot, just a few miles from the border in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province, said most of the troops had left the cantonment.

"The movement of troops to and from the border has increased. It is more than in routine times," he said.

Artillery exchanges have increased recently in the Sharkargarh-Zafarwal sector of the working boundary, a 220-km (136-mile) stretch of border between the line of control dividing mountainous Kashmir, and the frontier that runs down the plains in an eastward direction up to the Arabian Sea.

A senior local official in Sialkot said the army movements to and from the border had "not been very obvious," but declined to go into detail.

New Delhi accuses Pakistan of fomenting a decade-old revolt in Muslim-majority Kashmir. Pakistan denies sponsoring the rebellion, saying it only provides moral and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination.

Kashmir's main separatist alliance, the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, asked the two nations to exercise restraint in the region, which has triggered two of the three wars they have fought since independence from Britain in 1947.

----

India, Pakistan deploy missiles

December 25, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/25122001-063714-7810r.htm

NEW DELHI, Dec. 25 (UPI) -- Both India and Pakistan have moved their missiles close to the border and the line of control that divides the disputed Himalayan valley of Kashmir.

Quoting defense sources several Indian and Pakistani newspapers reported the move in their early Internet editions Wednesday.

"Pakistan has redeployed its strategic units aggressively" close to Indian positions, reported The Times of India. Both the countries use the term 'strategic unit' for troops equipped with ordinary and nuclear tipped missiles.

The Pakistani newspaper -- the Jang -- reported similar deployment on the Indian side, saying that the Indians were preparing for a war.

Officially, both sides deny such reports and blame the other for pushing for the war but the situation has deteriorated rapidly since Dec. 13 when alleged Kashmiri militants attacked the Indian parliament. Nine Indian security men and all five attackers were killed in the fight that followed.

In New Delhi, India's prime minister blamed Pakistan Tuesday of thrusting a war upon India, while Pakistan's president told a crowd in Karachi that his forces were ready for "any Indian adventure."

"We do not want war but war is being thrust on us and we will have to face it," Indian leader Atal Behari Vajpayee told a rally organized by the youth wing of his Bharatiya Janata Party on his 77th birthday.

Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf echoed similar sentiments when he told a rally in the southern port city of Karachi that Pakistan did not want a war but "is capable of defending itself if forced to fight."

Although talking tough, Pakistan made a little reconciliatory gesture Tuesday when it arrested a fundamentalist leader blamed by India for the suicide attack on its parliament.

Maulana Masud Azhar heads a militant organization called Jasih-i-Mohammed, one of the two groups blamed for the attack. Pakistan also has frozen the accounts of the other militant outfit, Lashkar-i-Toiba and forced its chief, Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed, to resign.

But India described these measures as "too little and too late" and urged Pakistan to disband all militants groups fighting in Kashmir and arrest their leaders.

As politicians exchanged allegations, residents on both sides of the border reported heavy troop-movement.

Even in a major urban center like Karachi, people saw hundreds of military vehicles moving anti-aircraft guns and missiles to sensitive areas to prepare for a surprise Indian attack, as a Pakistani military official said.

A presidential spokesman, Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, described the move as "an appropriate defensive measure against massive troop movement on the Indian side."

Officials told Indian journalists in New Delhi that Pakistan had made "some aggressive deployment along the border and in Kashmir during the last 24 hours."

They said the Pakistanis also had deployed "medium range ballistic missiles at some places."

"Moving missiles to sensitive areas has increased tensions. We are worried these missiles may be used. We are keeping a close watch," an Indian military official told The Times of India.

To counter these moves, the report said, Indian forces have "accelerated mine-laying operations in the border areas."

Residents reported heavy cross border firing in Kashmir during the last 24 hours, killing several villagers on both sides. Both sides also claimed destroying each other's bunkers and military positions along the line of control in Kashmir. A group of journalists who visited Kashmir Tuesday reported a continuous exchange of mortar and heavy machinegun fire between the Indian and Pakistani forces.

Thousands of civilians have already moved away from the border areas.

-------- russia

Russian journalist sentenced to 4 years

12/25/2001
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=25122001-025321-9472r

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia, Dec. 25 (UPI) -- A Russian military court on Tuesday sentenced military journalist Grigory Pasko to four years in prison for treason in the form of espionage.

Pasko insisted he had not betrayed his country and said he would appeal the verdict, Russia's Itar-Tass news agency reported.

Pasko was convicted of sending classified documents on the combat-readiness of Russia's Pacific Fleet to Japanese media.

Amnesty International called the verdict a blow to human rights in the Russian Federation.

"By reporting on the Russian navy's illegal dumping of nuclear waste off the coast of Vladivostok and informing the public about the dangers of such acts to human life and health, Grigory Pasko was ... acting in full compliance with Russian law," said William F. Schulz, Amnesty's executive director in Washington.

Schulz said the group would continue "to press for his release and full acquittal on all charges."

Pasko had been under investigation since 1996 when he was arrested on charges of spying for Japan. He was acquitted of the treason charges in 1999, but found guilty on lesser charges. He was sentenced to three years, but was freed immediately under a prison amnesty.

-------- u.s. nuc facilities

GAO Study Criticizes Finances for Nuclear Plants

Associated Press
Tuesday, December 25, 2001; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22682-2001Dec24?language=printer

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has failed to adequately ensure that owners of nuclear power plants have enough funds to safely own, operate and later decommission the facilities, according to a new congressional review.

The commission needs to tighten its review process for license transfer requests, especially because the future costs to dismantle a plant and dispose of radioactive waste could increase, said the study by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

The review was requested by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) because of concerns that deregulation and recent license transfers have affected decommissioning funds. Costs of decommissioning ranges from $300 million to $400 million per plant.

The NRC has licensed 125 nuclear power plants for a limited time. Utilities have sold or are in the process of selling all or part of 15 plants. Another 30 plants have had licenses transferred.

Before transferring a license to a new plant owner, the commission requires companies to have funds available either by making periodic deposits into a trust fund, prepayment, obtaining a surety bond, insurance or credit or guaranteeing payment if a parent company can meet certain financial requirements.

In general, enough money is being set aside to eventually take a plant out of service, the report said. But the NRC hasn't done enough to monitor the financial arrangements, it said.

The commission's "reviews were not always rigorous enough to ensure that decommissioning funds would be adequate," the report said. "Moreover, NRC did not always adequately verify the new owners' financial qualifications to safely own and operate the plants."

The NRC should request guaranteed additional revenue sources and document its review of any financial information -- including revenue projections, the report said.

Also, the report said the commission now allows plant owners to wait too long -- about two years -- before their licenses are terminated to perform radiological assessments to determine what additional cleanup might be needed. The GAO recommended the commission move up that deadline.

The commission, in response, said requiring the surveys earlier "would not add significant value to the decommissioning process." It also disagreed that it should modify its review guidelines to include a checklist process "because many of the proposed license transfers are unique."

----

Report Faults Fiscal Review of Nuclear Plants

December 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/national/25NUKE.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 24 (AP) - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has failed to adequately ensure that owners have enough money to safely own, operate and later decommission nuclear power plants, a Congressional review says.

The commission needs to tighten its review of requests to transfer licenses, especially because the costs of dismantling a plant and disposing of radioactive waste could increase, said the study by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

The review was requested by Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, because of concerns that deregulation and recent license transfers have reduced money available for decommissioning a plant, which costs $300 million to $400 million.

The regulatory commission has licensed 125 nuclear power plants for limited times. Utilities have sold or are selling all or part of 15 plants. Another 30 plants have had licenses transferred.

Before transferring licenses to new plant owners, the commission requires companies to make periodic deposits into a trust fund; prepay costs; or obtain a bond, insurance or credit to guarantee they can meet certain financial requirements.

In general, enough money is being set aside to take plants out of service, the report said, but the commission has not done enough to monitor the financial arrangements.

The commission's "reviews were not always rigorous enough to ensure that decommissioning funds would be adequate," it said. "Moreover, N.R.C. did not always adequately verify the new owners' financial qualifications to safely own and operate the plants."

The commission should ask for guarantees of additional revenue and document its review of any financial information, including revenue projections, the report said.

It also said the commission gave plant owners about two years before their licenses are terminated to determine whether additional cleanup was needed. The accounting office recommended shortening that time.

But the commission said an earlier deadline "would not add significant value to the decommissioning process." It also disagreed that it should modify its financial reviews "because many of the proposed license transfers are unique."

-------- colorado

Cleanup finished at Flats building

Denver Post,
December 25, 2001
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1002,53%257E295861,00.html

Cleanup workers at the former Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant have finished removing all radioactive liquids three months ahead of schedule from a building where plutonium was processed.

The action involved removing plutonium solutions from Building 771 and neutralizing them for shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, N.M.

It significantly reduces risk to cleanup crews and keeps the full project on schedule for completion in 2006, said assistant project manager John Schneider of the U.S. Department of Energy.

He said 38 liquid systems in the building were drained in the past three years. The cleanup project had been required to finish processing radioactive liquids from the building by the end of March.

Building cleanup started in 1995. In 1999 workers removed about 28 pounds of plutonium. Demolition is scheduled in 2004.

Rocky Flats made plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons for 40 years. It closed in 1989 after the end of the Cold War and after a raid by federal agents prompted by chronic safety problems.

-------- tennessee

Rumors of lab closures do not include ORNL

By Frank Munger
News-Sentinel senior writer
http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/sci_and_tech/article/0,1406,KNS_328_918900,00.html

Al Trivelpiece, during his years as director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, often preached that people shouldn't take ORNL and other research institutions for granted. As part of that sermon, Trivelpiece would pose this question: If ORNL didn't exist today, how much would the state of Tennessee be willing to ante up to acquire it?

The implication, of course, was that a prestigious national laboratory, with its thousands of employees and thousands of visitors and with a budget that annually exceeds half a billion dollars, is surely worth more than one of those car factories which states are constantly chasing after and tossing around millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives.

In other words, science labs are important and should be savored and protected and maybe even pampered a bit.

Trivelpiece told anyone who would listen that the future of the national labs, including ORNL, isn't guaranteed or necessarily secure. He cited periodic budget campaigns in Washington in which some rabble-rousing Congressmen -- usually those without a lab in their state (and certainly not in their district) -- would propose shutting down federal facilities as a cost-cutting measure.

Another one of those campaigns appears to be taking place now, with attempts to add Department of Energy facilities to base closure legislation and persistent reports that the Bush administration may actually seek to close 10 or more labs.

John Marburger, President Bush's science advisor, was asked about the lab-closure issue during his visit to Oak Ridge last week, and he danced around it pretty well.

At a breakfast meeting of the East Tennessee Economic Council, Marburger suggested the latest reports are not so different from rumors that have circulated many times before.

Interestingly, Trivelpiece was in the audience that morning, looking fit and happy, but, no, he wasn't the one asking the question.

Marburger told the crowd that the Department of Energy probably has more labs than they're aware of and acknowledged there's a possibility that some of the smaller ones could be closed or consolidated.

But he also offered the kind of definitive statement the local folks most wanted to hear regarding any closure plan:

"It certainly isn't going to apply to Oak Ridge National Laboratory."

After the meeting, I talked with Marburger for a few minutes and, among other things, asked him what he thought was the biggest challenge facing ORNL and the other national labs.

He is a former director of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and certainly knows the research battleground in the United States.

"To tell you the truth, the biggest challenge facing the national laboratories is public education," he said. "People don't really understand how science works and the role that national labs play in it. Ultimately, the national labs have to have public understanding in order to get public funding.

"The Department of Energy itself needs help to get the message out about what these labs actually do, and what they do is provide the infrastructure for science. When you read about science and see pictures and everything of protein structures and about all sorts of spectacular particle collisions -- that's the end product. But people don't realize you don't get that product without having these big technical capabilities that are in the national laboratories.

"You have people literally coming from all over the world to use the facilities in Oak Ridge, and when those people go back and publish their papers, they don't always talk about Oak Ridge. They talk about the work that they were able to do there, and that's what people see. They see the front end.

"But the national labs are part of the nation's science infrastructure, and just as with any infrastructure, it's hard to get money to fix your roof or fix the foundation of your house. We need to make sure that the public understands enough about science so that they're willing to support the infrastructure to keep it going."

Part of his job, Marburger said, is to explain these issues to Congress and various agencies that rely on the government's national laboratories to support their work.

He also said he thought it was the responsibility of journalists reporting on science and technologies to put that information in front of the public.

I guess that's what I just did. Merry Christmas.



-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

INTERIM GOVERNMENT
Afghanistan's New Ministers Go to Work and Face Plenty of Old Problems

New York Times
December 25, 2001
By AMY WALDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/international/asia/25MINI.html

KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 24 - The congratulatory fake flowers arrived in vibrant bunches, and the line of supplicants stretched out the door. For a minister in Afghanistan's new government, today seemed, at first glance, a very good day.

Ministers arriving at work today found demoralized, impoverished and, one minister pointed out, poorly dressed staffs; buildings stripped of all but a few desks, chairs and typewriters; portfolios in equally sorry shape; and not a cent to do anything about it.

There were employees desperate to be paid, after five or more months with no salary. There were women, and some men as well, fired by the Taliban and eager for their jobs back. There was plastic where windows used to be, and where the Ministry of Public Health's glass front wall used to be, nothing at all.

Perhaps it was not such a great day to be a minister after all.

If there was any doubt that Afghanistan's reconstruction would be a challenge, the meeting of ministers and their ministries today seemed to confirm it. If, as a United Nations spokesman, Ahmad Fauzy, said this week, "We are talking about rebuilding an entire nation" - from roads to bridges to hospitals to schools to the police - it will not happen from the government departments in their current condition.

Not surprisingly, then, an air of lethargy hung over some departments today. By 2 p.m., after greeting their guests, most ministers had left. At the Ministry of Education, the minister, Rassoul Amin, who has been living abroad, never arrived.

Instead, the deputy minister, Shirin Aqa Manavi, waited with his staff for visitors. He talked about how the Taliban had decimated the ministry, firing the female half of the staff, failing to maintain schools and forgoing the development of subjects like science in favor of the madrasas, the religious schools.

Salaries have not been paid for five months, so everything the ministry wants to do now - like remedial classes to prepare girls for school next spring - is dependent on the goodwill of its staff. Teachers have volunteered to teach the classes. Otherwise, they would not be possible.

The state of the ministries only reinforced the straits this government finds itself in. As an interim administration, it has only six months to work. It could take half that time to get the international aid that will make that work possible.

One Western official said the ministries had to be given "walking around" money quickly, and the United Nations has set a goal of raising $20 million for a fund for just that purpose. But the official said that Western donors tended to be wary of simply funneling money into a country with no accountability, and that the fund was far from its goal.

As it is, it seems that almost everything accomplished by the Taliban was financed by outside help. At the Ministry of Public Health, staff members waved off questions about budgets for different programs. The only real programs, they said, had been financed by the World Health Organization.

Another problem quickly becoming evident is the lack of institutional memory - yet another consequence of a change of government. Dr. Aghar is the new director of preventive medicine at the Ministry of Public Health. He knows the Taliban also had directors of preventive medicine, but he has no idea what they did or did not do. They are gone, not likely to be seen again.

Many of the ministries' staff members, of course, have remained. Government employees over the last six months or so have begged, borrowed, sold their clothes and possessions, and driven cabs on the side.

Today they greeted new bosses, hoping that long-overdue paychecks were in hand. They were not.

At the Refugee Ministry, the new minister, Enayatullah Nazeri, said he would have to wait for higher authorities to give him a budget. His office is on the second floor of what was once a private house. There is an empty swimming pool. Many of the rooms are virtually empty, too.

That did not stop several dozen women from coming to reclaim their jobs. They had heard a radio announcement that they should reapply, and today they came, some with children in hand. The minister said he would happily rehire them, once he had the money.

Some women with no history in government came because they saw a new window of opportunity for work. One of them, Ziaghol, came to the health ministry to try to fill out an application. Outside, she lifted her burka, revealing gray hair. She believed her age to be 55 to 60. She knew her hunger was bottomless.

"This is not the time of work for me," she said, referring to her age. "But I have to work. This is the age at which I should be sitting in the house and praying. But I have to work."

In the ministry, Ziaghol had entered a room where a deputy minister and job applicants clustered around a lantern because the power was out. That meant not only no lights, but also no heat and no tea.

The responsible ministry, the Ministry of Electricity and Water, has almost no desks and chairs.

"It did not look like a ministry, " the new minister, Mohammad Shaker Kargar, said, describing his arrival at his office today. "I was really disappointed when I saw the building."

It was no surprise after seeing the department, he said, that parts of Kabul had no power, and that other parts were prone to power failures; that Herat had not had power for five years; that Mazar-i-Sharif had had the weakest of power for three.

The state of the ministry, Mr. Kargar said, reflected the state of his portfolio. Even his staff's clothes were a sign of the times. Once engineers had worn professional, cosmopolitan clothes, he said. But today, he had seen only shabby Afghan clothes.

Mr. Kargar spoke in his room at the Hotel Inter-Continental, where two floors are serving as a fraternity house of sorts for new ministers. As he finished a thought, the power in the hotel went out, as it had already done several times that day. He lit a candle and said, "Please don't write that you were interviewing the minister of power by candlelight."

--------

Key al-Qa'eda contact said captured

The Associated Press
12/25/2001
USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/12/24/capture.htm

JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AP) - Anti-Taliban forces detained a top Afghan commander in eastern Afghanistan for alleged ties to Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda network, officials said Tuesday. Awal Gul, who played a key role in persuading Taliban commanders to surrender Nangarhar province to a council of tribal leaders, was arrested Sunday, said Mohammed Zaman, the province's defense chief.

"We have arrested Awal Gul because he was in contact with al-Qa'eda forces," Zaman said, refusing to elaborate.

Gul helped the Taliban when its forces moved into Nangarhar in 1996 and established close links with bin Laden and his terrorist network, said Atiqullah Racham, a military aide to provincial governor Abdul Qadir.

This month, anti-Taliban troops backed by U.S. bombing overran the Tora Bora cave complex, a major hide-out of al-Qa'eda fighters in Nangarhar. On Monday, Afghan militia commanders said most of the Tora Bora caves once occupied by al-Qa'eda forces have been cleaned out.

Many al-Qa'eda members are still believed to be on the run, with some trying to flee east into Pakistan.

"We didn't want to arrest him the first day we took over Jalalabad. We wanted to first capture Tora Bora, then arrest Awal Gul," Racham said. "He thought he might get a big position in the new government, but the (governing council) wants to arrest anyone who had contact with al-Qa'eda."

Racham said he didn't believe Gul's arrest would have any impact on the stability of Nangarhar province, which borders Pakistan.

Gul commanded a small militia loyal to Yunnis Khalis, a conservative Pashtun tribal elder who was an important leader in the war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Khalis, an Egypt-educated expert on Islamic law, welcomed the rise of the Taliban in 1996.

Today, Khalis is elderly and too ill to leave his home. And while he maintains a small militia, his role in eastern Afghan politics is limited to elder statesman and he holds no formal title in the new government.

--------

U.S. sees bin Laden leaving by sea

December 25, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011225-14149064.htm

Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization has access to scores of tramp freighters around the world, and the United States fears the terror mastermind could rendezvous with his "navy" on the Pakistani coast and sail to freedom.

U.S. officials said in interviews that front organizations for al Qaeda operate ships that at times are used by the 12-year-old terrorist network to move arms and foot soldiers from country to country.

The presence of this loosely knit fleet is one reason coalition naval forces in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea are tracking, and in some cases, boarding ships to check for any al Qaeda leadership fleeing Afghanistan.

"The biggest fear in the administration right now is that bin Laden will suddenly show up on al Jazeera - postwar dated," a senior intelligence official said.

The Arab TV news network is a favorite forum for bin Laden. A new tape that was verified as contemporaneous would be highly embarrassing to the Bush administration. It would represent proof that the millionaire Saudi-exile had evaded Washington's manhunt and might be able to start new terrorist attacks.

The intelligence official was critical of the administration's search for bin Laden to date. The source cited its failure to track a Pakistani journalist who traveled to Afghanistan to interview bin Laden in early November at the height of the 10-week air war.

Still, officials said they have seen no credible evidence that bin Laden has left Afghanistan. They strongly suspect he remains in the White Mountains of northeastern Afghanistan, between Jalalabad and Pakistan. He either continues to evade U.S. technical sensors and special-operations troops, or he lies dead in one of the caves struck by Air Force and Navy bombs, one official said.

"There really are only about three possibilities," Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the war's overall commander, said in Kabul on Saturday. "He can be in Tora Bora or in that area dead, he can be somewhere else in Afghanistan and still be alive or perhaps he may have gotten over into Pakistan. Right now, we don't know which of those three categories he's in."

Officials say they have a general idea of bin Laden's movements during the war. When the bombing began Oct. 7, he moved among caves and secret compounds around Kandahar, birthplace of the radical Taliban militia. After his Taliban protectors lost the capital of Kabul, and made a last stand at Kandahar, he moved north.

U.S. intelligence officials believe he stayed briefly near the border city of Khowst, then shifted his security detail and close advisers to the Tora Bora region. He moved from cave to cave as his last contingent of about 1,000 al Qaeda fighters engaged in a fierce, two-week battle against the eastern alliance.

U.S. military officials are reasonably sure he was, and may still be, in Tora Bora. There were credible reports that members of his entourage moved in and out of the area during the air war's last days. Officials are also sure they heard his voice on a tactical radio five days before Tora Bora fell to Afghan fighters.

If bin Laden were to make it to the sea, officials believe Somalia's past willingness to harbor al Qaeda fighters would make the east African country his first choice.

One Bush administration official, however, said he saw an internal report that bin Laden might try the daring maneuver of returning to his native Saudi Arabia. There, he might live in tribal desert regions near Yemen that are generally ignored by the royal family's security forces.

Saudi Arabia exiled bin Laden in the 1980s. He set up operations in Sudan in 1991 before moving to Afghanistan in 1996. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf says his forces have sealed routes leading from the White Mountains' Tora Bora region to Pashtun tribal areas of Pakistan where bin Laden might find refuge.

"We are guarding each one of these passes," Gen. Musharraf said. "Maybe he is dead because all the operations that have been conducted, the bombardment of all the caves that have been conducted. There is a great possibility that he may have lost his life there. He is not in Pakistan."

The question of whether bin Laden's body lies in Tora Bora may be known soon. Gen. Franks is close to dispatching U.S. troopsto help special-operations soldiers and anti-Taliban forces search caves and tunnels used by al Qaeda planners.

--------

Uzbek warlord named deputy defense minister

December 25, 2001
By Kathy Gannon
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011225-94396578.htm

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghanistan's new interim leader, Hamid Karzai, appointed prominent warlord Rashid Dostum as deputy defense minister yesterday, aiming to defuse a potential disruptive force by bringing him into the two-day-old government.

Meanwhile, U.S. B-52 bombers repeatedly hit a munitions bunker north of Kandahar, a military spokesman said yesterday. Cmdr. Dan Keesee of U.S. Central Command said U.S. forces also dropped leaflets over six Afghan cities on Sunday.

"They did multiple strikes," said Air Force Lt. Col. Ken McClellan, a Pentagon spokesman. "Apparently, they hit an ammo dump. So there were a lot of secondaries," or follow-on explosions.

In eastern Afghanistan, tribal commanders said they have investigated most of the caves at Tora Bora, al Qaeda's former base, which was overrun last week by tribal forces backed by U.S. bombing and special forces.

U.S. officials say the caves may contain valuable information as they search for fleeing al Qaeda members, including mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Mr. Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek who controls the largest northern city, Mazar-e-Sharif, with his own private army, had been angry because the key ministries of defense, foreign affairs and the interior all went to an ethnic-Tajik group from the Panjshir Valley.

"I have just signed the letter naming him deputy minister of defense," said Mr. Karzai, who is a member of Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns. "It is the first step toward a national army."

Since he took office Saturday, Mr. Karzai has vowed to bring security and development to this war-torn nation, where leaders of armed factions often command more loyalty than a central government does.

Mr. Dostum, 47, was a key partner in the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, made up mostly of Afghanistan's ethnic and religious minorities, including Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and Shi'ite Muslims. But he also has a long history of bad blood with many Northern Alliance commanders.

His large army of well-trained fighters fought side-by-side with U.S. special forces troops last month in taking Mazar-e-Sharif, the first major Taliban city to fall under the pressure of relentless American air strikes.

A whiskey-drinking former general in the communist Afghan army with a persistent reputation for ruthlessness, Mr. Dostum also fought alongside Soviet troops who occupied Afghanistan throughout the 1980s. He later defected from the government army and joined the Afghan guerrillas.

He will work under Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim, who is from the Northern Alliance and said yesterday that international peacekeepers were welcome in Afghanistan for no longer than six months.

Mr. Karzai quickly countered by saying the foreign troops will stay "as long as we need them, six months as a minimum." Their presence in Kabul "is a commitment to peace in Afghanistan, to stability in Afghanistan, and once that is accomplished, they will go," he said.

The first contingent of British Royal Marines is patrolling government buildings. The British-led force is expected to number 3,000 to 5,000, including 1,200 troops pledged by Germany and 1,500 by Britain.

Meanwhile, a top local leader said yesterday that some 350 members of al Qaeda remain in eastern Paktia province, where U.S. planes struck a convoy of trucks on Friday. Amanullah Zardran said that fellow tribesmen who witnessed the convoy attack told him that local officials and Taliban and al Qaeda members were on board.

On the humanitarian front, elements of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division and other U.S. forces are upgrading airfields and infrastructure at Mazar-e-Sharif and Bagram so they can be used for large-scale aid distribution in Afghanistan, Col. McClellan said.

-------- india

Big Troop Movement Mounted by India and by Pakistan

New York Times
December 25, 2001
By CELIA W. DUGGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/international/asia/25INDI.html?pagewanted=all

NEW DELHI, Dec. 24 -- A warlike momentum is building between India and Pakistan as both countries mount large-scale troop buildups along the full length of their border in response to rising antagonism since a suicide attack this month on India's Parliament.

India quickly blamed Pakistan and two Islamic groups operating openly there for the Dec. 13 assault.

Western diplomats say the troop mobilizations now are the largest they have seen in more than a decade between the two nuclear adversaries, which have waged hot and cold wars for the last half century.

Both nations say they are reacting defensively to each other's buildups and have every hope that strenuous efforts to resolve their differences through diplomacy will succeed. For now, they are preparing just in case.

The Pakistani Army has canceled all leaves for its troops and told them to report for duty immediately. India is moving troops by the trainload from what one military official called "peace locations in south and central India" to its northwestern border with Pakistan.

Military officials in both countries say the buildup is not just in Kashmir, the territory both claim, but along the international border that divides the Indian states of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Punjab from the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Sind. Neither side would give estimates of how many troops were in motion.

Here in India's capital, a nasty contretemps has erupted over India's decision today to expel a man on Pakistan's diplomatic staff. The Indian authorities say he is a spy who may have fed intelligence to the suicide squad that attacked Parliament, a charge Pakistan dismissed as absurd.

Those developments follow India's decision on Friday to recall its envoy to Pakistan for the first time in 30 years and to sever bus and rail links between the countries.

Most policymakers and pundits in both countries still seem to think that the chain of events set off by the attack on Parliament will not lead to war, not least because the addition of nuclear arms to the region makes the risks appallingly high. But for other reasons, too, virtually nobody wants armed conflict.

Many of these experts seem to be counting on the United States -- which is suddenly, since Sept. 11, a crucial player in the region -- to make the other country see sense.

In Pakistan, the thinking goes, the United States cannot afford a war between India and Pakistan that would jeopardize the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his Qaeda leaders who may have fled into Pakistan; so the Americans will press India to settle for a tough diplomatic strategy.

In India, the possibility that officials might escalate to war has put extreme pressure on the United States to turn the screws on Pakistan to shut down the militant groups implicated in the Parliament attack.

On Thursday, President Bush stood in the Rose Garden on the 100th day since Sept. 11 and condemned terrorist attacks on India and the murderous ways of Lashkar-e-Taiba's, one of the two groups India has blamed for the attack on Parliament. The next day, he called on Pakistan's military ruler, President Pervez Musharraf, to close down both Lashkar-e-Taiba and the other group, Jaish-e-Muhammad.

In Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, the atmosphere in recent days has been normal, with people preparing for festivities on Tuesday, which is not only Christmas, but also a national holiday on the birthday of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

Mostly, those who worry about an Indian attack believe that it would come in a limited strike on militant groups' operations in the part of Kashmir that Pakistan controls, not in Pakistan itself.

But in India, there is a growing sense of unease about rising tensions after a week in which India's senior elected officials in effect issued an ultimatum to Pakistan: Either shut down the two Islamic militant groups blamed for the attack that killed 14 people, including the five assailants, or all options are open, including military action.

Today, there was a flurry of activity from Pakistan in response to India's demands, but none of it satisfied India in the least.

General Musharraf told reporters today in China, where he is on a state visit, that he would crack down on Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad if there was evidence to prove their guilt in the attack on Parliament.

"We are taking a very comprehensive look at the entire issue of terrorism emanating from anywhere, especially in our own country," he said.

But Indian officials insisted again today that there was already a wide enough trail of evidence about the two groups to justify Pakistan's immediate arrest of their leaders, as well as a shutdown of their activities.

Privately, Indian officials are willing to give General Musharraf a little time to act. A senior Indian official today suggested a way out of a diplomatic cul-de-sac.

Pakistan is demanding evidence, and India is refusing to share it directly with Pakistan. The official said the United States or another country that has seen India's case could tell Pakistan about it.

Pakistan's state bank partly met one of India's demands today. It froze the assets of Lashkar-e-Taiba, or the Army of the Pure, which has sent hundreds of militants to fight Indian rule in Kashmir with suicidal attacks on army posts and -- India charges and the group denies -- massacres of civilians.

But India's concerns that the militant groups will play a shell game, changing names and hats but not real identities, got a boost today.

Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who heads both Lashkar-e-Taiba and a powerful sister organization that runs hospitals and more than 130 schools, announced that he was resigning as head of Lashkar.

Lashkar itself will be relocating all its operations to Kashmir, he said.

Mr. Saeed said he would stay on as head of the social and religious group based near Lahore, Pakistan, and restrict himself to religious duties. He said the war against India would continue in Kashmir.

"Now we have planned decisive attacks in Kashmir," he is quoted as saying on the sister group's Web site.

Vijay Nambiar, India's recalled high commissioner to Pakistan, told reporters in Islamabad today that Mr. Saeed's resignation was insufficient. "We want the culprits to be brought to book," he said.

The spy case that came to a head today has also sharpened each side's rhetorical knives. Tales of diplomatic staffers detained and roughed up are a regular occurrence in these cold war days between India and Pakistan. The latest incident has gained more notice than usual because of its timing.

The Pakistani Foreign Office fired the first rhetorical shot on Sunday with a statement charging that India kidnapped Muhammad Sharif Khan, a member of Pakistan's mission in New Delhi, while he was shopping at a market on Saturday.

"During the interrogation, he was stripped naked, severely beaten up and tortured, resulting in visible and internal injuries, which were also confirmed in the medical report," Pakistan's statement said.

India returned fire through a news release from the Delhi police that charged that on a tip, Mr. Khan had been caught red-handed outside Nirula's restaurant accepting sensitive documents relating to atomic energy, nuclear research and railway security from Ajay Kumar, a senior executive assistant in a research office of the Indian Parliament.

The news release said that Mr. Kumar had admitted giving Mr. Khan information over the last couple of years in exchange for money and that Mr. Khan had repeatedly asked about security arrangements around Parliament.

This morning, an official involved in the investigation showed The New York Times a videotape of two men said to be Mr. Khan and Mr. Kumar having a bite to eat at Nirula's.

Their faces appeared to be very similar to those on their official identification cards, though the sight angles were different, making certainty elusive. There was also no date on the video.

The last frames on the video show a man said to be Mr. Khan walking and stiffly climbing into a van. The Indian authorities said this showed him being handed over to people from Pakistan's High Commission here after he was questioned.

India denies that Mr. Khan was tortured. The authorities here say they strongly suspect that he may have been passing on information about Parliament that was used by the suicide squad on Dec. 13.

Home Minister L. K. Advani today called the case against Mr. Khan and Mr. Kumar, the Indian Parliament staff member, a serious matter that would have serious consequences.

Another Indian official involved in the investigation said: "What happened in Parliament needs much deeper investigation. Pakistan's terrorist groups are being provided information and targets by intelligence operatives working under cover in the Pakistan High Commission."

At Nirula's, a tiny outlet of the chain restaurant with only five tables, the cashier who was on duty when Mr. Khan and Mr. Kumar are said to have met was not working and had no phone number. Other employees said they recognized Mr. Kumar as a customer there, though not the other man.

Members of Mr. Khan's family, reached by phone today in the central Punjab town of Sargodha, were worried and proud, and they refused to discuss any details of his life.

"This event is nothing personal," said his elder brother Raja Abdul Latif. "It is an event of national dimensions. Although we are saddened by the incident, we understand that he is doing a national duty.

We would be happy even if our brother's life is sacrificed for the country."

--------

Tensions Escalate Between India and Pakistan in Kashmir

December 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-India-Pakistan.html

NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- India's army ordered residents in border villages to evacuate and the air force moved more equipment to the frontier as tension with Pakistan mounted Tuesday.

Indian soldiers and Pakistani troops exchanged heavy gunfire and shelled each other in the Jammu region of Kashmir and one Indian soldier was killed, the army said.

``There is worry in many nations about what will happen if there is a war between India and Pakistan,'' Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said at a public address at his residence. ``We do not want war, but war is being thrust on us and we will have to face it.''

Indian defense officials said they were responding to an extensive troop buildup on the other side of the border and the cease-fire line that divides the disputed Kashmir region between the two South Asian nuclear rivals.

Pakistan's government has said it has beefed up military forces on the frontier in response to a troop buildup by India.

``The situation is getting more and more difficult to contain. There is a very very strong sense of mistrust,'' India's ambassador to Pakistan, Vijai Nambiar, said on his return to New Delhi after being recalled from Islamabad.

Border skirmishes are common between India and Pakistan along the frontier in Kashmir, a disputed Himalayan area that has been the flash point of two wars between the countries since independence from Britain in 1947.

But clashes have become more frequent since a Dec. 13 suicide attack on the Indian parliament, which India blamed on Pakistan-based Islamic militants fighting to separate mostly Muslim Kashmir from Hindu-majority India. The attack killed 14 people, including five suicide attackers.

India, which claims the militants are sponsored by Pakistan's government, has demanded that the Islamabad government shut down their offices, freeze their assets and hand over their leaders.

Pakistan's government says it offers only moral support to Kashmiri separatists and denies aiding any extremist groups.

In the Indian capital, hundreds of civilians rallied for peace. Hundreds of women, children and social workers formed a human chain around the India Gate, a red sandstone pillar built in the memory of martyred soldiers, and urged the government not to wage war. They held placards that said: ``We want peace, not war.''

Frontier air bases in western Rajasthan state have been strengthened, an air force official said on condition of anonymity, adding: ``We are ready to counter and combat any eventuality.''

India has some of its key air bases in Rajasthan, a mostly desert region that shares a 708-mile border with Pakistan.

More air equipment has been moved to air bases in Bikaner, Barmer and Jaisalmer, about 300 miles southwest of New Delhi.

Railroad authorities said about a dozen passenger train services on the rail routes linking these air bases and other army facilities were suspended ``to facilitate smooth transportation of troops and weaponry to the frontier bases.''

In the Jammu region, the Indian army said Tuesday that it had destroyed eight enemy bunkers since shooting began in the region Sunday, when Pakistani troops shot and killed two Indian soldiers on patrol.

More than 2,000 villagers have evacuated and moved to safer places.

As gunfire spread to more areas, one soldier was killed Tuesday south of Jammu and army ordered civilians living in the are to evacuate, an army official said on condition of anonymity.

Mortar shelling also continued in two other sectors, Poonch and Naushera, where three Indian soldiers were critically wounded, the official said.

India has said diplomacy is its first option, but that war was also a possibility. It has demanded that Islamabad shut down the militants' offices, freeze their assets and hand over their leaders.

India is also planning economic measures against Pakistan, which may include scrapping the Most Favored Nation trade status to Pakistan and a treaty on sharing of water from rivers that originate in the Indian territory and flow through Pakistan, the Hindustan Times Newspaper reported Tuesday.

On Monday, India expelled a Pakistan High Commission employee in New Delhi for allegedly collecting sensitive national security information.

State-owned Pakistan International Airlines may also be stopped from flying its jetliners to India, the newspaper said. New Delhi has already announced it would suspend bus and train services to Pakistan as of Jan. 1.

-------- iraq

Turkish General: Don't Target Iraq

December 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Turkey-US-Iraq.html

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- Turkey's top general argued against targeting Iraq in the U.S.-led war on terrorism, saying Tuesday that it could lead to an undesired Kurdish state on Turkey's borders.

Turkey supports the current war on terrorism and served as the launching pad for attacks against Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War and host U.S. and British warplanes enforcing a no-fly zone above northern Iraq since then.

Although Turkey's parliament on Tuesday extended that mission's mandate for six months as it did for years, Washington would still need Turkey's consent to use Turkish bases to stage possible attacks on Iraq.

``Is there any new mistake committed by Iraq? Or accounts of 10 years ago are being settled?,'' Gen. Huseyin Kivrikoglu, chief of the general staff, told reporters Tuesday evening. His comments reflected skepticism about Iraq emerging as a possible target.

Advocates of attacking Iraq argue that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is trying to restart programs to build weapons of mass destruction, which U.N. inspectors tried to dismantle after the 1991 Gulf War. Inspectors have not been allowed into Iraq since departing ahead of U.S. airstrikes in late 1998.

Kivrikoglu indicated that if Saddam is ousted, Iraqi Kurds would take advantage of a power vacuum to set up a Kurdish state which may boost aspirations of autonomy-seeking Kurds inside Turkey.

``Nobody would like this country (Iraq) to fall apart and the emergence of new ethnic states,'' said Kivrikoglu.

President Bush has said the U.S. war against terrorism would not be limited to Afghanistan, but has not said what country might next become a U.S. military target. Iraq has emerged as one possibility, along with Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

-------- japan

Tokyo defends firefight with suspected spy ship

December 25, 2001
By Chisaki Watanabe
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011225-9437216.htm

TOKYO - Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi defended the shooting of a suspected North Korean spy ship and said yesterday that the incident underlined the need to bolster national security.

An unidentified fishing boat sank late Saturday after trading machine-gun fire with coast guard vessels after a six-hour chase that began when it ignored orders to stop for inspection off Japan's coast, Japanese officials said.

Two bodies from its estimated 15 crew members were recovered, with the rest still missing yesterday. Three Japanese coast guard sailors were slightly injured in the firefight.

Mr. Koizumi praised the coast guard for tracking and hunting down the mysterious ship late Saturday night, though he said the chase took too long. He suggested that laws restricting Japan's military hindered the coast guard from taking action earlier and limited coordination with other military branches, such as the navy.

"We should examine what we need to do legally and realistically," Mr. Koizumi said, adding that equipment upgrades also should be considered. "The ship had pretty high strike capabilities and was heavily armed."

Japan's pacifist, postwar constitution limits the use of force by the military and coast guard to self-defense and keeps troops largely bound to Japanese territory.

Mr. Koizumi has been pushing strongly for a wider role for the military, although he has sidestepped the largely taboo issue of revising the constitution.

Japanese Coast Guard officials released night-vision video footage that seemed to depict the unidentified ship firing a rocket at Japanese gunboats. They said one Japanese ship was hit by gunfire more than 100 times in the encounter.

"We fired shots in legitimate self-defense, and I think we took appropriate actions," said Tetsuo Yokoyama, a regional Coast Guard operations chief.

Masao Kurusu, captain of the Coast Guard cutter Amami, said the unidentified trawler opened fire first, after the Amami and two other Japanese ships surrounded it.

Japanese ships began chasing the trawler when it ignored orders to stop for inspection. It fled toward China and eventually sank in the East China Sea just outside Chinese territorial waters.

The boat foundered within minutes of the Japanese returning fire. It was unclear whether it was sunk by gunfire or scuttled by its crew, though a Japanese sailor reportedly watched through a night-vision lens as the boat's crewmen set off an explosive device on board.

Beijing said it was "concerned" about Japan's use of military force off its coast and said it would petition Tokyo for more information about the incident.

Japanese defense officials and analysts said the boat closely resembled two suspected North Korean spy ships detected off the western coast of Japan in March 1999. Those ships escaped.

A life jacket and a candy bag found on the bodies of the two recovered victims had Korean writing on them, but it was unclear whether they were manufactured in communist North Korea or democratic South Korea.

Mr. Koizumi and other Cabinet officials have not commented on the identity of the boat. State-run media in North Korea have not reported on the incident.

Japan and North Korea, which do not have diplomatic ties, are divided by history and ideology. Japan took over the Korean Peninsula in 1910 and ruled it as a colony until 1945. North Korea's official media regularly lambaste Tokyo for harboring what they call militaristic ambitions.

-------- pakistan / india

Pak cancels leave for all military personnel

The Times of India Online
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=173750169

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has cancelled leave for troops and recalled all its military personnel on leave as part of its high alert to the build-up of Indian troops in Rajasthan, Sindh and Central Punjab borders.

All defence personnel on leave have been directed to report for duty at the earliest, an action taken to face any eventuality, defence officials here said.

Reports reaching here said there was movement of heavy defence equipment towards border areas.

Defence officials closely monitored the situation at the borders and have taken all "appropriate measures," the officials were quoted as saying by Dawn.

Besides the military build-up on the international border, the tension on the Line of Control (LoC) dividing Kashmir was also mounting, the paper said adding that Pakistan has already re-deployed its troops on the LoC, which had been unilaterally withdrawn by the government last year as part of its policy of "maximum restraint" aimed at normalisation of relations with India.

It said the intensity of skirmishes between the two armies on the LoC had increased significantly over the past few weeks.

Pakistan army, for the first time since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, is faced with double border situation, as a significant number of troops and military assets have recently been deployed at the Durand Line on Afghanistan to apprehend Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda fighters, the paper said.

In Afghan border areas, US troops were closely working with Pakistani army for monitoring the movement of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters fleeing from Tora Bora, it said. ( PTI )

-------- spy agencies

Groups Slam Russian Treason Verdict

December 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Treason-Trial.html

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia (AP) -- Human rights groups called the conviction of a military journalist for espionage the latest in a series of blows to free expression by Russia's security services.

Grigory Pasko, who reported on alleged environmental abuses by the Russian navy, was sentenced Tuesday by a military court here to four years in a maximum-security prison for treason.

``The country still does not fully understand what road the FSB is taking it down,'' a letter by the Moscow Helsinki Group said, referring to the Federal Security Service, the successor to the Soviet KGB. Signers of the letter included well-known activist Yelena Bonner.

Pasko had initially been accused of divulging state secrets on the combat-readiness of Russia's Pacific Fleet to Japanese media.

But the court found him guilty of attending a secret meeting of commanders of the Russian Pacific Fleet in 1997 to discuss the results of tactical naval maneuvers, and of possessing notes that he made there.

``The essence of the sentence is absolutely incomprehensible to me, Pasko told the court.

The case is one of several in past years against whistle-blowers for allegedly revealing secret information.

Pasko says he was prosecuted because of his reports of alleged abuses by the navy, including claims it dumped radioactive waste into the Sea of Japan.

The Norwegian environmental group Bellona supported Paskso and said the verdict ``means that Russia is becoming less open on environmental issues.''

William F. Schultz, director of Amnesty International USA, said in Washington that Pasko's prosecution ``has been a window into a justice system that continues to operate in secrecy and in the service of political masters rather than the law.''

U.S. Consul General James Shoemaker observed the proceedings in what he called ``a case for human rights.'' He called the verdict ``a bit unexpected.''

Pasko was arrested in 1997 and acquitted two years later of treason charges, but found guilty of abuse of office. Pasko appealed the verdict seeking a full acquittal. Russia's Supreme Court sent the case back to trial with a different judge.

-------- us

Campaign by Pilot's Family Secures Benefits for Gulf War Veterans

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
December 25, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/national/25VETS.html

SOUTH WINDSOR, Conn. - Michael Donnelly was at the top of his game flying combat missions in the Persian Gulf war. His plane, the F- 16, was handsome and sophisticated. Tall and strapping in his olive drab flight suit, his blue eyes hidden behind aviator glasses, Major Donnelly seemed the perfect match for that machine.

Today, at 42, the retired fighter pilot and father of two needs a ventilator and a feeding tube to stay alive. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., has stripped him of his ability to move or speak. From his wheelchair, he communicates with his eyes, forming words by painstakingly blinking the alphabet.

It has been six years since Major Donnelly got sick, and in that time he and his family have waged an impassioned campaign to convince the government that the gulf war was to blame. In a book, on television and in a stream of telephone calls to the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department, they pressed the case. With the Defense Department denying the existence of "gulf war syndrome," it seemed a losing battle.

This month, they won.

In large part because of Major Donnelly, Anthony J. Principi, the secretary of veterans affairs, declared that A.L.S., long known as Lou Gehrig's disease, was connected to gulf war service. He ordered medical, disability and survivor benefits for those affected - the first time the government had linked a specific illness to service in the region. The decision was prompted by a study finding that veterans of the conflict in 1990 and 1991 had nearly twice the risk of A.L.S. as those who were not deployed - a study conducted primarily because Major Donnelly's father, Tom, pushed for it.

For many scientists, the study is unconvincing. Though Veterans Affairs officials call it solid, it has yet to be subjected to the independent verification known as peer review. Though the doubling in risk seems large, epidemiologists typically look for even greater differences, especially with conditions as rare as A.L.S., to rule out statistical flukes.

So officials say Mr. Principi's decision was driven not so much by scientific findings as by the wrenching knowledge that a progressive, fatal disease was trapping healthy young veterans like Major Donnelly inside their bodies. Because A.L.S. advances so rapidly, Mr. Principi said, he felt he did not have time to wait for peer review.

"Maybe it's because I have two sons in the Air Force," Mr. Principi said, relating how he called Tom Donnelly to thank him for his advocacy. "I can relate to Mr. Donnelly and the plight of his son."

Major Donnelly is elated by the decision. On a recent afternoon, he could be found taking physical therapy at home, in a room recently redecorated to display his military medals, awards and leather flight jacket. (Possessed of a wry sense of humor, he calls it the "I Love Me Room.") Asked about Mr. Principi's action, his face brightened. His wife, Susan, counted out letters as he blinked a simple reply: "I was thrilled."

Patient advocates come and go in Washington, but in a place where politics is personal, the Donnellys were able to cut through the bureaucracy and put a face on a devastating disease. Major Donnelly published his memoirs, "Falcon's Cry" (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998), a 251-page book written with his sister, Denise.

They tracked down other sick soldiers, and hooked up with H. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire, who finances research on gulf war veterans. Mr. Perot, in turn, put them in touch with Larry King, who had them on his program on CNN.

When he could still speak, Major Donnelly testified on Capitol Hill - where, as it happens, Representative Christopher Shays, a Republican from the pilot's home state, Connecticut, has been a stinging critic of the Pentagon's treatment of sick gulf war veterans. Later, Tom Donnelly took up speaking for his son. The elder Mr. Donnelly, a former Marine helicopter pilot, was on the phone to the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department so often that officials there call him by his first name.

"It had a lot of effect," said Dr. John R. Feussner, the Veterans Affairs official who ordered the A.L.S. study. He met with the Donnelly family in Boston last year and was so touched that when asked about the ailing pilot, he broke down in the middle of the conversation.

"He was kind of the real deal," Dr. Feussner said. "He's the all-American boy. Goes to war." At that, he stopped, unable to go on. Collecting himself, he continued: "The sense I had is that he had done his part, and he and his family were asking a reasonable question: Do I have this disease because of something that happened to me when I was in the military?"

Despite the recent study, experts say there is still no answer to that question.

There is no known cause of A.L.S., which progressively destroys motor neurons to the point where patients can no longer breathe or swallow on their own. It is typically fatal within two to five years of diagnosis, though a ventilator can extend a patient's life. The disease is rare, so the number of affected soldiers is small.

The government study, conducted by Dr. Ronald Horner, an epidemiologist at Duke University and the Veterans Affairs hospital in Durham, N.C., found that of 700,000 veterans who served in the gulf from August 1990 to July 1991, 40 had the disease. About half are already dead. Of 1.8 million veterans in the same period who were not deployed, 67 fell ill.

The study awaits publication in a scientific journal, but Dr. Feussner says the results are solid. At the Pentagon, Dr. Michael E. Kilpatrick, the official responsible for tracking health problems in combat soldiers, predicted that the findings would engender "a lot of scientific debate."

If, for example, the authors missed some cases of A.L.S. in the nondeployed group, the difference between the two groups might disappear. Even if the numbers are accurate, said Dr. Donald A. Berry, chairman of the department of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, such studies are useful only to corroborate existing research or lend support to a plausible biological explanation for the cause of a particular disease.

"If it's just in a vacuum," Dr. Berry said, "then it doesn't have much credibility."

Since the war, more than 100,000 veterans have complained of an array of symptoms, from joint pain to muscle aches, rashes, chronic fatigue and gastrointestinal ailments, that have collectively come to be called gulf war illness. So far, the government has spent $155 million on 193 research projects to investigate their complaints. The studies have found no definitive links, although several have suggested that stress, exposure to chemicals, or prophylactic medicines given to soldiers may be a factor.

----

Gulf lessons used to avert Afghan 'syndrome'

December 25, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011225-73408688.htm

Military health officials hoping to prevent an Afghan War Syndrome are applying a decade's worth of lessons from the Persian Gulf war to U.S. troops now in conflicts abroad.

Defense officials are more vigilant about medical record-keeping for their troops, and servicemen and women are required to get simple medical screenings before and after deployment.

The military is also more selective about whom it sends overseas.

During the 1990-91 Gulf war, some reservists and National Guard troops were deployed in a hurry.

"And we found that we actually had shipped to the Gulf some people who really weren't healthy enough to go," said Dr. Francis O'Donnell, who heads the Pentagon's medical readiness department.

Some critics, however, argue that Pentagon officials aren't doing enough.

Steve Robinson, executive director of the private National Gulf War Resource Center, said medical screenings required since 1997 should include physical exams before, during and after deployment.

"That is what will protect soldiers who are out there fighting in Afghanistan," he said.

Mr. Robinson said he learned during visits to military installations while working as an investigator with the Pentagon unit that dealt with the Gulf War Syndrome that many troops failed to complete the mandatory questionnaires. He left the position and retired from the military in October.

Mr. Robinson said troop commanders would rather put their emphasis on areas other than health protection.

"For them, it's more important to talk about how we're going to distribute [ammunition], or to talk about where the enemy is," he said.

An estimated 90,000 troops who served in the Gulf war say they suffer from a strange assortment of maladies including memory loss, anxiety, nausea, balance problems and chronic muscle and joint pain.

The government reported this month that Gulf war veterans are nearly twice as likely to develop Lou Gehrig's disease as other military personnel. It was the first acknowledgement of a scientific link between service in the Gulf and a specific disease.

Pentagon officials have acknowledged that a serious health problem exists but insist that no single illness is behind what has become known as Gulf War Syndrome.

Dr. O'Donnell said the medical questionnaires have helped catch problems that otherwise might have slipped through.

"This is something that got its emphasis because of what happened with the illnesses in Gulf war veterans - the notion that maybe we missed something when we sent folks to the Gulf and brought them home," he said.

Dr. O'Donnell said other post-Gulf war measures implemented to prevent a recurrence of massive mysterious symptoms include environmental monitoring of areas where they plan to send troops.

Military officials learned that Bosnia, for example, was an "environmental nightmare," Dr. O'Donnell said, referring to the region's waste from industrial chromium and lead plants.

In 1998, the Pentagon also required the collection of data on non-battle injuries and diseases for troops abroad. While yellow fever or other infectious diseases can wound troops, "dumb old things like diarrhea from eating the local fare" can disable more troops than bullets, said Capt. Jeff Yund, the Navy's deputy director of preventive medicine and occupational health.

The data collection is "meant to give us the ability to monitor rates of illness and injury and when things start to go awry, we can detect it sooner rather than later," he said.

"The purpose is to allow the organic medical personnel to follow trends and illness and injuries in its own unit, and to be able to detect early on when those rates go up."

The armed forces are moving to convert the medical records of each service member into an electronic database.

Despite all recent efforts, no one is saying such actions a decade ago could have eliminated the symptoms linked to Gulf War Syndrome.

"It is very challenging to draw lessons from the Gulf War Syndrome when its still an incompletely defined syndrome," said Dr. Donald Krogstad, chairman of tropical medicine at Tulane University.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

DOMESTIC SECURITY
Ridge Is Opening a Center to Analyze Data

New York Times
December 25, 2001
By ALISON MITCHELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/national/25RIDG.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 24 - Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security, is opening a national coordination center in a former naval complex here that will analyze and share intelligence about threats and vulnerabilities with federal agencies. It will also coordinate the response of agencies to a terrorist attack.

Officials say the center, on Nebraska Avenue several miles from the White House, will be staffed by employees from an array of agencies. Having them in one place, officials say, will help break down technological and bureaucratic barriers that block information sharing among agencies like the C.I.A. and F.B.I.

"It's fair to say the whole Nebraska Avenue facility is designed to foster more cooperation across the federal government," said Susan Neely, the communications director for the Office of Homeland Security. "Ultimately the intent is to have information coming in from state and local governments as well."

Ms. Neely said the center would begin operations next month and be running at full strength by the end of 2002.

Officials at the center will know, for example, that a train containing chemicals passes near an outdoor sporting event, she said, or that an F.B.I. interview with a detainee indicates a city may be a terrorist target.

"That kind of information will be run through here," Ms. Neely said. "People in a centralized location can better determine what should be done with it."

The creation of the center also gives a greater physical presence to an operation that so far has been personified by Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ridge, an adviser to President Bush, has become much less visible since the anthrax attacks of October have subsided.

The center is the first sign of the concrete role Mr. Ridge envisions for the staff he is assembling to coordinate agencies and develop a comprehensive national strategy for security against terrorism.

Bill Berger, the police chief of North Miami Beach, who met with Mr. Ridge recently, said the former governor told a group of police chiefs that "we need to establish our credibility and place our operation somewhere that's identifiable."

Many in Congress have expressed doubts about how effective Mr. Ridge can be if he continues as an adviser to the president, without his own agency or budget powers.

Although the federal government has a variety of intelligence agencies and spends billions of dollars a year on information and technology, the events of Sept. 11 revealed problems in distributing critical information quickly.

In August, intelligence officials asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to put 2 of the 19 terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks on a watch list to bar their entry into the United States, only to learn they were already here.

Since then, an array of reports have underscored the difficulty of sharing information and the flaws in the system.

Until recently, the immigration service had made little effort to locate people who failed to show up at deportation hearings and disappeared. This month, the service said it would give the F.B.I. the names of 314,000 people who have disappeared, to go into a national criminal data base.

The Justice Department's inspector general recently reported that the merger of the fingerprint files of the F.B.I. and the immigration service, seen as a tool to catch terrorists, was years away. It would help ensure that suspects did not slip in or out of the country.

Mr. Berger, the North Miami Beach police chief, who is president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said police officials told Mr. Ridge this month that threat alerts from the F.B.I. spilled out of computers with a flood of other law enforcement information, with no sign that it was urgent.

"It's not separated out," Mr. Berger said, adding that the local police can hear about alerts faster on CNN than from Washington.

And the problems stretch beyond law enforcement. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently found that fewer than half of the nation's health departments had high-speed Internet access and that 10 percent had no e-mail address. The agency, in a report, also said that only 13 states had high-speed Internet connections with all their counties.

-------- terrorism

'Disaster' averted on blast devices

December 25, 2001
By Steve LeBlanc
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011225-6660168.htm

BOSTON - Explosive devices that a man is accused of smuggling aboard an airliner in his sneakers were strong enough to cause serious damage and would have created a "major disaster" if detonated on the Paris-to-Miami flight, the FBI said yesterday.

The suspect, whose identity is still not clear, was ordered held in federal custody yesterday pending a bail hearing. Authorities said they had no evidence to link the 28-year-old man to Osama bin Laden's terror network.

The man was traveling on a British passport identifying him as Richard C. Reid, but was initially identified by French authorities as a Sri Lankan named Tariq Raja. A French official said yesterday that investigators there consider him a British national, and U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan said the passport appeared legitimate. He also has used the name Abdel Rahim.

The scraggly haired Mr. Reid appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith Dein yesterday, sitting alone and dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit and prison-issued plastic sandals. He showed little emotion, and when asked if he understood the charge - intimidation or assault of a flight crew - he answered quietly: "Yeah."

Mr. Reid asked for a court-appointed attorney and was ordered held pending a bail hearing Friday. If convicted, he could be sentenced to 20 years in prison. The FBI said more charges are likely.

During the American Airlines flight Saturday, two flight attendants and at least a half-dozen passengers grabbed Mr. Reid and used belts to strap him into his seat after, the passengers say, he tried to touch a lit match to a fuse protruding from one of his shoes.

The Boeing 767 airliner, carrying 183 passengers and 14 crew members, was escorted to Boston by two fighter jets.

One passenger who helped subdue the man, Kwame James of Trinidad, said that when other passengers asked Mr. Reid why he did it, "He just kind of smiled and didn't say too much."

He said Mr. Reid told one passenger: "Don't worry. You'll see."

Investigators would not identify the type of explosive material they said was found in devices in Mr. Reid's sneakers, but said preliminary FBI tests determined the devices were functional.

"It would have resulted in significant damage, and we did avert a major disaster," said Charles Prouty, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office.

Mr. Reid will undergo a routine psychiatric evaluation, said jail spokesman Michael Seele in Plymouth.

"He's been very compliant," Mr. Seele said. "He's been very cooperative."

Mr. Prouty said the FBI was investigating whether Mr. Reid had links to bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist group, and hasn't ruled anything out. But a government official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators had nothing to link him to al Qaeda.

Mr. Reid met with an officer from the British Consulate in Boston just before yesterday's hearing. The meeting is standard for anyone presumed to be British and charged with a serious crime, said consulate press officer Terri Evans.

"The issue of confirming his identity and nationality is part of the investigation with Scotland Yard and FBI," Miss Evans said. "We'll go with the assumption he is British unless we learn something to the contrary."

U.S. authorities have issued a new security directive to airlines and airport authorities in the wake of Saturday's flight, the Federal Aviation Administration said yesterday.

The directive, issued late Sunday, "requires airports and airlines to take specific action" to step up security for aviation, said FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown.

Airports around the country and in Europe boosted security following the incident. Some are requiring passengers to send their shoes through X-ray machines. Paris airports increased the number of bomb-sniffing dogs.

Walk-through X-ray machines used in the United States to screen passengers for weapons can't detect plastic explosives, and most passengers and their carry-on bags aren't checked for explosives by other means, such as bomb-sniffing dogs.

While Congress has ordered that U.S. airlines have a system by Jan. 18 to inspect all checked baggage for explosives, walk-through devices that could detect them on passengers are still in the developmental stage.

During the flight, Mr. Reid, who was sitting behind the wing in the coach section, lit a match, but put it in his mouth when confronted by flight attendant Hermis Moutardier, the FBI said in an affidavit.

Miss Moutardier told the captain and returned to see Mr. Reid with a match held to the tongue of his sneaker, then noticed a wire protruding from the shoe. She tried to grab the sneaker, but Mr. Reid reportedly pushed her to the floor and she screamed for help.

Another flight attendant, Cristina Jones, intervened and Mr. Reid bit her hand, authorities said.

Miss Moutardier threw water in his face and other passengers reached Mr. Reid and subdued him, agents said.


-------- activists

No War in God's Name, Pope Christmas Message Says

By Philip Pullella
Tuesday December 25 7:47 AM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011225/wl/pope_christmas_dc_2.html

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope John Paul (news - web sites), in his Christmas message to the world, said on Tuesday God's name could never be used to condone violence and urged that children be saved from the cruel effects of adult conflicts....

----

Franco Dino Rasetti, a Nuclear Pioneer, Is Dead at 100

By WOLFGANG SAXON
New York Times
December 25, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/obituaries/25RASE.html

Dr. Franco Dino Rasetti, who worked with the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi and the select team of Italian scientists that discovered one of the key processes in nuclear reactions, died on Dec. 5 at a retirement home in Belgium. He was 100.

The discovery, made in a laboratory at the University of Rome, proved pivotal for the Manhattan Project and the postwar development of nuclear energy.

The Fermi group patented the process in Italy in 1934 and in the United States in 1940, and Dr. Rasetti was the last surviving patent holder.

Fermi, a central figure in the Manhattan Project, had invited Dr. Rasetti to join that quest for an atomic bomb, but Dr. Rasetti refused on moral grounds. He told his colleagues that he objected to using nuclear research for warfare.

Dr. Rasetti specialized in molecular spectroscopy and neutron-induced reactions. But he was also known as an expert on a large class of fossilized arthropods like crustaceans, known as trilobites, and on the wildflowers of the Alps.

After he retired from Johns Hopkins University, where he was a professor for more than 20 years, Dr. Rasetti donated the trilobite fossils he had amassed to the Smithsonian Institution.

Dr. Aihud Pevsner, a physics professor at Johns Hopkins, said: "People who found they could not identify trilobites all over the world would mail them to him. Every morning he would get a shoe box full of them, and every afternoon he'd have them all identified and ready to mail back."

Dr. Rasetti was born in Castiglione del Lago, Italy. He was studying engineering at the University of Pisa when an encounter with Fermi led him to change his mind. He received his doctorate in physics at Pisa in 1923, and Fermi recruited him for the University of Rome.

There, Dr. Rasetti found evidence that scientific theories of the composition of atomic nuclei were incomplete. He used spectroscopy to buttress his finding, and his experiments were an element in the successful creation of a nuclear reaction.

Most of the Fermi team left the Rome laboratory in 1939 because of Mussolini's policies. Dr. Rasetti, who had been a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1936, went to Laval University in Quebec, where he remained until he joined the Hopkins faculty in 1947. He retired as a professor emeritus in 1970.

He also wrote "Elements of Nuclear Physics" (1936), "Middle Cambrian Stratigraphy and Faunas of the Canadian Rocky Mountains" (1951), "The Flowers of the Alps" (1980) and many articles on physics, geology and paleontology.

Dr. Rasetti is survived by his wife of 52 years, Marie Madeleine.

----

On charity and love, from the epistles of Paul the Apostle

Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20011224-786804.htm

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

PAUL THE APOSTLE Ephesus 1 Corinthians 13 King James Bible


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